Local Climate Assemblies as Agents of Justice

There is a growing number of local authorities running citizens’ assemblies on climate change at the local level. These local climate assemblies are groups of twenty and a hundred citizens who were near-randomly selected, where assembly members hear expert opinions, deliberate about achieving net-zero emissions, and finally issue policy recommendations to governance authorities. Local authorities that run local climate assemblies often vow to utilize the recommendations issued by local climate assemblies to implement appropriate climate policies. Nevertheless, the reality is that what local climate assemblies recommend does not always lead to direct policy change. Instead, as Pancho Lewis and others recently pointed out, the extent to which local authorities implement policy recommendations of local climate assemblies depends on their power, resources, and commitment. Granted that local climate assemblies can have a limited impact on climate change policy-making, we argue that they can act as agents of justice, helping achieve climate justice. We will employ a "harm-avoidance-oriented approach" to justice proposed by Simon Caney to make our arguments. This approach addresses who should do what in order to prevent a catastrophe. Accordingly, the harm-avoidance-oriented approach entails identifying agents of justice who are responsible for realizing climate justice. We build on John Dryzek’s and Ana Tanasoca’s discussion to classify agents of justice into two categories: implementing and formative. Implementing agents of justice are those who have the capacity to enforce the duties of justice, for instance, by enacting laws or the capacity to contribute to realizing justice directly, for instance, by complying with those laws. In contrast, formative agents of justice are those who can specify what justice requires in a specific context. With this conceptual framework in mind, we argue that local climate assemblies can act as formative agents of climate justice, drawing on a real-world example, the Climate Assembly Tsukuba 2023 (CAT). CAT operated from September to December 2023 in Tsukuba City, Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan, to consider and discuss "carbon-neutral, livable Tsukuba City in 2050." CAT exercised its formative agency by (a) specifying what climate justice requires at the local and national levels, (b) identifying how implementing agents of justice, such as the national government, Tsukuba City municipal government, companies, and citizens, should fulfill their responsibilities for realizing climate justice, and (c) giving priorities to different climate policy options through voting—or so we shall argue. We finally discuss whether it is feasible and desirable that local climate assemblies act as implementing agents of climate justice.